#456 — September 27, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

The Making of a 13 Kilobyte JS Real-Time Strategy Game — Last week we linked to the 200+ entries in the recent JS13KGames contest, but if you’ve wondered how developers actually build such games, here’s a look behind the scenes.

PhobosLab

Why JavaScript Tooling 'Sucks'“JavaScript tooling is just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault,” says Shawn. JavaScript’s history, ownership, and target use cases have all had a role to play.

Shawn Wang

Instantly Know When JavaScript Errors Occur & How to Fix Them — With JavaScript error tracking from Rollbar you get exception & crash reports in real-time. Track & debug bugs in record time. Start monitoring & fixing errors in minutes - Try Rollbar for free.

Rollbar sponsor

V8 Adding Support for Top Level await — This is only a link to a git commit but basically support for top level await is being added to V8. Node's REPL already supports this via the --experimental-repl-await option, but this should make it mainstream.

V8 Repo

A Look at V8 v7.8 — Every six weeks we’re treated to a look at the newest release of the V8 JavaScript engine. v7.8 continues to improve performance (such as with faster object destructuring) and has some improvements for WebAssembly users too (there’s now a way to use V8 solely as a WebAssembly execution engine from C/C++).

Ingvar Stepanyan

Node 12.11 Released: Worker Threads Go Stable — The underlying V8 engine has been updated to version 7.7 which results in some performance improvements and locale-aware support for number formatting with Intl.NumberFormat. Worker threads are now considered stable, too, which opens up a lot of new opportunities.

Node.js Foundation

Quick bytes:

  • The new executive director of the OpenJS Foundation is Robin Ginn, formerly an exec at Microsoft responsible for MS's engagement with the Node project.
  • The CEO of npm, Inc. has resigned and they're now looking for a new one.
  • Gatsby is now the richest JavaScript site generator in town as it has raised $15m in funding.
  • Out of nowhere, an entertaining review of Douglas Crockford's 2018 How JavaScript Works book.

💻 Jobs

Can You Help Our Client Migrate to Node.js? Docklands, (London, UK) — Do you have experience and strong opinions on Node best practices? Come and share your advice with an engaged, friendly team of excellent software engineers.

CareersJS

Engineering Manager - Boston, MA — Upstatement seeks a maker/manager to help build impactful digital products for clients we believe in as a part of a passionate team.

Upstatement

Find a JavaScript job through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

📘 Articles & Tutorials

How JavaScript Works: How V8 Optimizes for Efficiency — An explanation of how the V8 JavaScript engine (as used in Chrome and Node) makes your code run as fast as possible, followed up with a few tips on improving your code to help V8 out.

Alvin Wan

▶  15 Year Old JavaScript: Decoding Dreamweaver's MM_swapImage() — This is truly a blast from the past! Back in the day, the popular Dreamweaver Web design tool could create image rollovers for you (before CSS had :hover) and it used JavaScript to do so. But what did this ancient JavaScript look like?

Wes Bos

On Demand: Getting Started with NodeSource and AWS Lambda — Monitor the performance and optimize the efficiency of your serverless functions running on AWS Lambda.

NodeSource sponsor

15 Must-Have, Productivity-Enhancing Vue.js Directives — A reasonable list, covering things like v-hotkey, v-lazy, v-tooltip and v-focus.

Nada Rifki

A Few Handy Vue.js Tricks

InfectoOne

Why Your Angular App Is Not Working: 7 Common Mistakes

Valerio Pisapia

Accessibility for Web Developers. Get the Whitepaper

Progress Kendo UI sponsor

Let's Write a Basic 'Brainf--k' Interpreter — It’s not a compiler, as it says, but if you’re a beginner new to the ideas around interpreting a programming language yourself, you might enjoy this casual introduction.

Michele Riva

A TypeScript Tutorial for Beginners: The Missing Guide — Very much a beginner level introduction, but may be useful if you’ve not yet jumped on the TS train.

Valentino Gagliardi

🔧 Code & Tools

gpu.js 2.0: GPU Accelerated JavaScript — Compiles JavaScript into shader language which can then be compiled and run on GPUs for significantly boosted performance in specific use cases (neural networks, raytracing..)

gpu.js Team

OGL: A Minimal WebGL Framework — WebGL is not the easiest technology to use on its own, so libraries like Three.js are often used to make its functionality more accessible. This is a lighter weight attempt to keep you close to the metal without cutting your hands.

Nathan Gordon et al.

Wallaby.js Can Increase Your Coding Productivity by More Than 10% — Wallaby catches errors in your tests and code and displays them right in your editor as you type, making your development feedback loop more productive.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Repeater.js: The Missing Constructor for Creating Safe Async Iterators — Inspired by both Clojure and Go.

Brian Kim

Robot: A 1.3KB Library for Creating Finite State Machines

Matthew Phillips

PixelMatch 5.1: A Fast Pixel-Level Image Comparison Library — Give it two images, it’ll highlight the differences.

Mapbox

Emulating a 4-Bit Virtual Machine using TypeScript's Type System — A clever little hack, though there’s no shame in not understanding how it works at first.

Ashley Claymore

⚡️ Quick Releases